Italy countercyclical fact of the day

Revenue raked in by Italy’s mob
surged 40 percent last year, turning crime into the nation’s No.
1 business, Eurispes said in its annual report.

Income increased to 130 billion euros ($167 billion), up
from about 90 billion euros in 2007, according to figures
supplied by Eurispes and SOS Impresa, an association of
businessmen to protest against extortion. Drug trafficking
remains the primary source of revenue, bringing in about 59
billion euros, and the mob earned 5.8 billion euros from selling
arms, the Rome-based Eurispes research group said today.

Maybe the maffia can invest in US stocks now that they are so cheap (will the DJI be under 7,000 tomorrow?). They may want to wait a few weeks, perhaps months, to see how much longer it takes to OHB and his Dream Team to deal with the banking crisis. We already have a stimulus plan and a promise to bring the deficit down to just half a trillion dolars in four years, but we don’t know when we are going to have a financial stability plan. The Dream Team cannot handle the elephant yet, but apparently they think that it will fit in the small box they’ve promised to build. In the meantime, thanks Tyler for entertaining us with news from around the world.

fwiw, there is no “mafia”, but rather several loosely organized overlapping groups. :La Cosa Nostra”, although the most famous in the US, is a distant second to the “camorra”. “Mafia” income, already especially difficult to track, has the real danger of double and triple counting revenues gained by various factions